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The Bailey School

H.C. Bailey | Margery Allingham | Anthony Wynne | Philip MacDonald | J.J. Connington | Ruth Rendell

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The Bailey School

H. C. Bailey

Call Mr. Fortune (collected 1919)

  • The Efficient Assassin
  • The Hottentot Venus
  • The Business Minister

Mr. Fortune's Practice (collected 1923)

  • The President of San Jacinto
  • The Young Doctor
  • The Magic Stone
  • The Snowball Burglary
  • The Leading Lady
  • The Unknown Murderer

Mr. Fortune's Trials (collected 1925)

  • The Young God (1925)
  • The Long Barrow (1925)

Mr. Fortune, Please (collected 1927)

  • The Cat Burglar (1926)
  • The Lion Party (1926)
  • The Little House (1926)

Mr. Fortune Speaking (collected 1929)

  • Zodiacs (1927)
  • The Woman in Wood (1928)

Mr. Fortune Explains (collected 1930)

  • The Football Photograph (1929)
  • The Face in the Picture

Case For Mr. Fortune (collected 1932)

  • The Greek Play (1930)

Mr. Fortune Wonders (collected 1933)

  • The Yellow Diamonds
  • The Gipsy Moth

Mr. Fortune Objects (collected 1935)

  • The Yellow Slugs (1935)

A Clue for Mr. Fortune (collected 1936)

  • The Torn Stocking
  • The Swimming Pool

Mr. Fortune Here (collected 1940)

  • The Point of the Knife

Anthony Wynne

Sinners Go Secretly

  • The Cyprian Bees (1924)
  • Footsteps

C.E. Bechhoffer Roberts

A.B.C. Hawkes stories

  • The Persistent House Hunters

Margery Allingham

Sweet Danger (1933) (Chapters 1 - 5, 10)

Traitor's Purse (1940 - 1941) (Chapters 1 - 10)

Mr. Campion: Criminologist (collected 1937)

  • The Case of the Man with the Sack (1936)
  • The Border-Line Case

Mr. Campion and Others

  • The Old Man in the Window (1936)
  • The Definite Article (1937)
  • The Question Mark (1938)
  • The Name on the Wrapper (1938)
  • The Hat Trick / The Magic Hat (1938)
  • The Meaning of the Act (1939)
  • Safe As Houses (1940)
  • A Matter of Form (1940)

The Allingham Case-Book

  • The Border-Line Case
  • The Lieabout
  • One Morning They'll Hang Him (1950)
  • The Villa Marie Celeste (1960)
  • The Snapdragon and the C.I.D. (1961)

The Return of Mr. Campion

  • The Case Is Altered (1938)

Uncollected Mr. Campion stories

  • On Christmas Day in the Morning (1952)

J. J. Connington

The Four Defences (1940)

Philip MacDonald

"The Wood-for-the-Trees" (1947)

The Bailey School

H.C. Bailey

H.C. Bailey was one of the most popular and most critically acclaimed writers of the Golden Age of detective stories (1920 - 1945), but his work has dated badly today, in my judgment. The typical 1930's story of Bailey, or one of his followers, has the following paradigm. The detective is usually a medical expert, a doctor or scientist who is also a member of Britain's upper classes, who works closely with Scotland Yard, and who is highly respected by them as a genius. He is assigned a case, one that often looks superficial or simple. The detective is disturbed by some simple looking clue, and suspects that some evil conspiracy is lurking in the background. He follows up on this, often over the protests of the police that he is making things too complicated, and discovers an incredibly evil conspiracy behind the wings. The goal of this conspiracy is to injure or kill some innocent helpless person, usually either a small child, or a defenseless young woman. The motive is usually greed, such as obtaining an inheritance, combined with a very sick mentality that sees nothing wrong in the torture of the innocent. Oftentimes the mechanism of this diabolical conspiracy is scientifically based, and the villain has a scientific or medical background, too. Detective work uncovers a hidden background to the current crime, often another crime in the past, one that forms a complex piece of mystery plot all on its own. At the end, there is a melodramatic finale, in which the detective struggles to keep the villain from committing yet further sinister crimes. Throughout the story there is an atmosphere of evil, combined with the action of melodrama.

One can see several problems with this formula from such a description. There is often a concentration on horror elements in such a work, an approach that has never been a favorite of mine (for whatever reason I have no interest in horror fiction whatsoever, marking me out as very different from the typical American reader of the 90's). Secondly, there is often an emphasis on morbid psychology, a look inside sick minds. This was exactly the element about Bailey's tales that appealed to Dorothy L. Sayers, who felt that Bailey's work in this direction showed "originality", but it often just seems to me to be "sick".

There are also formal problems with the approach of the Bailey School. The hidden conspiracies and complex backgrounds of the tales are often "deduced" by the detective from the slenderest and most innocuous looking clues. It often seems to me that their approach violates the convention of "fair play", that there is no way an intelligent reader or other independent observer could actually deduce these complex background plots from such slender threads.

I am not sure I really should be including any of the work of the Bailey School on a list of "My Favorite Mysteries". Certainly, some of the stories show real power, and deserve at least some respect for inventiveness. However, I also have very strong reservations about all of this fiction. None of these works come highly recommended by me. To be fair, I must admit that my sampling of the Bailey school is quite superficial, and that there might be some outstanding works lurking in these writers' bibliographies that I have not yet read. In particular, some of Anthony Wynne's impossible crime novels are now beginning to gather a reputation. Also, one might point out the unanimous critical acclaim that at one time greeted Bailey's work. He was both praised and anthologized by S.S. Van Dine, Dorothy Sayers, Ellery Queen, and Howard Haycraft, a clean sweep of the great critics of the Golden Age. Also, the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection says that he was the most popular mystery writer in Great Britain between the wars. This means that his works were more popular than Chesterton, Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers or Carr, something that seems incomprehensible today. Despite all this, I cannot work up any great enthusiasm for his work. One might also note, that I still get very nice letters from contemporary enthusiasts of Bailey's fiction, so his work still has a significant following. One might also note that Earl Emerson's Going Crazy in Public (1996) pays homage to Bailey, by including characters named both for H.C. Bailey himself, and for his lawyer detective Joshua Clunk.

The Bailey School: Realists Vs Intuitionists

Where does Bailey's work fit in detective fiction history? Certainly, Bailey and company considered themselves aligned with the fair play, puzzle plot detective stories of the Golden Age. I would agree, with the caveat that the Bailey school's work often fails badly in the "fair play" department.

Within the Golden Age, where does Bailey's fiction fit? Is he aligned with the "intuitionist" school of Chesterton and Christie, or with the "realist" school of Freeman and Crofts? S.S. Van Dine firmly associated Bailey with the intuitionists, as Bailey's detectives, like Christie's, get their solutions by a mix of intuition and logical deduction, instead of anything resembling the realistic detective work of Freeman and Crofts. While Van Dine has a point, it also seems to me that Bailey's work is quite a ways off from what Jon L. Breen calls the Main Street of the detective story centered on such great intuitionist writers as Christie, Queen and Carr. One might add that Bailey's introduction "Mr. Fortune" to the collection Meet Mr. Fortune disavows that there is anything "intuitionist" about his sleuth.

The Bailey School's work also has some features in common with that of Freeman and his followers. The presence of doctors as detectives, combined with the frequent use of scientific or medical techniques to commit crimes, seems similar to Freeman's work. Bailey himself often used physical clues from which Mr. Fortune made deductions à la Dr. Thorndyke. Especially in the earlier stories, Mr. Fortune often concentrates on forensic analysis of the body to reconstruct the crime, also in the Thorndyke tradition. He combines this with a thorough look for other physical evidence at the crime scene. The clues also sometimes draw on natural history of plants in the vicinity of the crime, another Freeman-like idea. All these features make it likely that Mr. Fortune was originally conceived with Dr. Thorndyke as a model. The Fortune stories also occasionally deal with antiquities, another Freeman theme. There are tiny ancient statuettes from prehistoric cultures that serve as clues in such early Bailey stories as "The Hottentot Venus" and "The Young God" (1925).

Mr. Fortune loves to quote phrases from classic literature, a trait perhaps derived from another Realist school pioneer, E. C. Bentley. The best early Mr. Fortune tale "The Business Minister" also shares Bentley's skepticism about the rich and powerful, that appeared in Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1913). "The Profiteers", an otherwise annoying ghost-story-masquerading-as-a-mystery, also has a vein of social criticism, going after businessmen who made a killing out of World War I. "The Profiteers" contains a brief but memorable statement of Supt. Bell's religious views, a subject that returns in "The Cat Burglar". "Zodiacs" (1927) offers a satiric look at murder of a businessman affecting events in the stock market, also echoing Bentley's novel.

The presence in "The Cat Burglar" (1926) of ex-Scotland Yard Inspector Mordan, now a private inquiry agent, echoes the regular appearance in Crofts of the British version of the private eye. Mordan is one of the more interesting recurring characters in the Fortune series.

However, the extremely melodramatic storytelling of the Bailey School seems like the dialectical antithesis of Freeman and Crofts, who stressed sober realism in all things. Bailey has little interest in alibis, and that Realist school standby "the breakdown of identity" rarely occurs in his fiction. Nor does the Bailey school create "backgrounds" that realistically depict some industry or social institution, although perhaps the North Country local color in Bailey's The Red Castle (1932) comes close.

All in all, it makes sense to consider Bailey and his followers as a "third school", one directly allied with neither Chesterton and Christie, nor with Freeman and Crofts. I have never seen any attempt at all to "place" Wynne or Bechhoffer Roberts in detective fiction history; both are fairly obscure writers. I have grouped them with Bailey on grounds of perceived similarities with his works. And although Ernest Bramah preceded Bailey by a decade as an author, some of his 1920's works show some affinities to the Bailey school. Such works as "The Mystery of the Poisoned Dish of Mushrooms" and "The Disappearance of Marie Severe" deal with children in jeopardy. They also have the medical background that often shows up in Bailey.

Bailey's first Mr. Fortune tales appeared in book form in 1919, a year before the appearance of Freeman Wills Crofts' The Cask (1920) and Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), often taken as the start of the Golden Age. Bailey did not publish a mystery novel till 1930, concentrating on short stories, instead. This emphasis on the short form seems more typical of the pre-Golden Age era of Doyle and early Freeman, rather than of the 1920-1950 period in which most of Bailey's mystery fiction actually appeared.

There are Doyle like elements in Bailey's Mr. Fortune stories. Both Sherlock Holmes and Mr. Fortune typically intervene in the midst of a complex, on-going intrigue, hoping to prevent a tragedy. Neither typically just stands around and solves an already completed crime, the way many Golden Age sleuths do. Fortune's disparagement of the police echoes Holmes belittling of Lestrade. Holmes solving a crime in A Study in Scarlet through being able to read German is echoed by Fortune's using his knowledge of Greek in "The Long Barrow", "The Violet Farm" and "The Picnic". The opening of "The Long Barrow" seems designed to contrast Holmes' position as a consulting detective, with Fortune's collaboration with the police.

Bailey Themes

It has been fashionable in mystery fiction criticism to assert that, while Chandler and other hard-boiled writers often criticized police corruption, Golden Age writers depicted society as wholly good, and the police as agents and guardians of social virtue. W.H. Auden described Golden Age fiction as a fairy tale in which the bad were cleansed out of a good society. I feel very dubious about this whole critical approach; it is especially off in the case of Bailey. Bailey was extremely skeptical of the police. Such tales of his as "The Cat Burglar" (1926), "The Little Finger" and "The Yellow Cloth" and the novels Black Land, White Land (1937) and The Wrong Man (1945) air many criticisms of the police. Other British set Golden Age novels that criticize police corruption include John Rhode's contribution to Ask a Policeman (1933), and John Dickson Carr's Death-Watch (1935), as well as some of Edmund Crispin's stories in Beware of the Trains.

Bailey's tales are notable for their bloodthirstiness. There is often not one crime going on in a short story, but multiple killings, assaults, disappearances, burglaries, arson, con games, you name it. This is not merely a matter of melodrama, although Bailey exploits the lurid potential of such events to the max. It also aids Bailey's puzzle plotting. Bailey often shifts roles in the solution of his plots. What was assumed to be done by one character, was in fact done by another. Even before the solution, much of the criminal investigation done by Mr. Fortune and the police consists of speculations about the perpetrators of the crimes in the tale, with a constantly shifting perspective on who might have committed them. Bailey is uninhibited about coincidence. He finds nothing odd in a situation where two or three criminals are all running amok at once, piling up interlocked crimes that are all attributed to each other.

Bailey tales are often about kidnappings. These stories tend to come in pairs. An early pair consists of "The Magic Stone" and "The Little House" (1926). These tales seem like versions of each other. Both end with a climactic raid on a nest of bad guys. A later pair of stories describe kidnappings after outings in the countryside. In both, there are physical remains of the outing for the detective to study. This pair consists of the Mr. Fortune story "The Picnic" and the Joshua Clunk novel The Red Castle (1932).

Other Bailey tales also come in pairs. "The Young God" (1925) is a greatly improved version of material found earlier in "The Nice Girl". Both stories involve dysfunctional families in which there is an ambiguous, hard to interpret killing; their chief suspect being brought to trial, followed by a final revelation of the truth. The earlier story has some offensive stereotypes. Bailey has also made the characters more likable in the second tale, and deepened the amount of mystery.

Another early pair of tales is "The Archduke's Tea" and "The Missing Husband" (1926), in which an outsider wife is suspected of attacks on her aristocratic husband. Both of these minor works suffer from having only one real suspect aside from the wife - not a very mysterious situation. Bailey succeeds in bringing home the crime to the Most Likely Suspect, not a good paradigm for the mystery. The chief merit of the otherwise forgettable "The Archduke's Tea", which is the first Mr. Fortune story, is that it introduces recurring Scotland Yard characters the Honorable Stanley Lomas, chief of the Criminal Investigation Department, and his associate Superintendent Bell, and gives perhaps the best description of these men found in the series.

Bailey set a pair of his tales on the European continent. "The Hazel Ice" (1927) is a minor story. But it develops an approach that Bailey would use with perfection later, in "The Face in the Picture": a continental setting, Fortune bonding with a sophisticated, charming, and highly competent official of a foreign police force, and a mystery against a specialized background in that same country. In "The Hazel Ice", the policeman is Swiss, and the background is mountain climbing; in "The Face in the Picture", the gourmet policeman is French, and we look at the French art world. "The Face in the Picture" is very knowledgeable about both its Parisian setting, and modern art. Bailey, like Agatha Christie, was clearly quite pleased with modern painting. Fortune's relationship with both policemen offers a pleasing variation on his ongoing friendship with Lomas. The French policeman, Dubois, will return in "The Long Dinner" (1935).

Several stories of Bailey's use clues involving plants. Bailey knew a great deal about the flowers and trees growing in both the English countryside and in suburban gardens. Traces of these are always being found on bodies and at crime scenes. Bailey also liked butterflies and moths; he is almost as interested in these creatures as R. Austin Freeman was in mammals. Some of his stories give vivid pictures on butterfly hunting in the between the wars British countryside, especially "The Long Barrow" and "The Holy Well". In general, many of Bailey's best tales are woven around charming knowledge of some subject: nature, antiquities, art.

"The Football Photograph" (1929) is a sort of police procedural. It follows Fortune and his police colleagues as they collect evidence and gradually close in on a murderer. It is not fair play - the reader can only watch as Fortune makes his deductions from physical and medical evidence. It is absorbingly written, with an interesting look at working class life and settings. Fortune itself says it is unusual in his work, in that he has no "emotions" in the case - since there are no strong issues of protecting the innocent, just tracking down a routine murder. This somehow makes a good counterpoint with the mechanical clockwork type effect of gathering more and more evidence. In this story, Mr. Fortune's quotes of poetry turn out to be from traditional British inspirational hymns and moralizing educational poems. "Duty, stern daughter of the voice of God" is from William Wordsworth's "Ode to Duty" (1815); "Do the work that's nearest, / Though it's dull at whiles, / Helping, when we meet them,/ Lame dogs over stiles" is by Charles Kingsley, social reformer and proponent of "muscular Christianity"; Methodist Charles Wesley scripted the 1749 hymn, "And are we yet alive, and see each other's face? Glory and thanks to Jesus give for His almighty grace!" This anticipates Bailey's other sleuth, Joshua Clunk, who also likes to quote Methodist hymns. Both Fortune here and later Clunk quote poems that praise work, and urge people to do it - a strong theme.

"The Profiteers" (1925) and "The Rock Garden" are unusual among the Mr. Fortune tales in being ghost stories. As long as the reader knows this to be the case they make pleasant enough reading. However, anyone who thinks the ghostly events of the tales are impossible crimes that are going to be explained rationally at the end, is in for a severe let-down. "The Rock Garden" also has a genuine mystery in its plot, separate from the ghost story. "The Long Barrow" (1925), "The Painted Pebbles" (1927) and "The Rock Garden" (circa 1929) are among those Fortune stories in which he goes into a country house in which all sorts of strange emotional cross-currents and oddly spooky events are taking place - but no apparent crime. Fortune has to untangle the hidden emotional relationships of the characters - and usually discovers that some sort of sinister scheme is taking place under the surface. All three involve a strange earthworks of some sort, near the house; in the first two these are of archaeological significance. All three invoke superstitious practices, for eerie effect - although as already said, "The Rock Garden" does not explain this away at the end. The stories also have some similarities in the kinds of personal relationships among the characters which Fortune uncovers. The best of these is the first, "The Long Barrow".

Each of the early Fortune collections has a comic story. These tales deal with crimes much less serious than murder. Although they have the form of mystery tales, they eventually reveal burlesque solutions. The tales seem to spoof the mystery as a form. This is especially true of "The Snowball Burglary". This is a rare example in Bailey of an intricate "timetable of the suspects' movements during the crime" mystery, an approach he usually eschews. Bailey shows he can pull this off with imagination. "The Hermit Crab" is an extreme example of a Dr. Thorndyke like deduction from natural facts, also used for somewhat of a burlesque here. "The Snowball Burglary" and "The Hermit Crab" form another of Bailey's story pairs. Both have a similar "extra mystery" in their story's final pages, with a similar kind of solution. A slightly later comic tale, "The Lion Party" (1926), is another work in the direct pattern of "The Snowball Burglary", with a house party leading to a series of complex incidents.

"Zodiacs" (1927) looks like a conventional mystery, at first, but it actually is more like one of Bailey's comic tales in disguise. Its sophisticated dialogue is delightful, and full of funny repartee. Its plot eventually develops approaches in common with some of Bailey's comic tales. "Zodiacs" has some structural approaches in common with "The Leading Lady", an earlier story that also bears an ambiguous relationship with the comic tales. Both of these can be considered as experimental mysteries, works that playfully bend the paradigms of the mystery tale. One wonders if Agatha Christie remembered "The Leading Lady", when she wrote the classic climax of The Tuesday Night Club Murders, "The Affair at the Bungalow". Both have actress characters, both show experimental variations on mystery paradigms, although these variations are different in each author.

The 1920's comic tales, such as "The Snowball Burglary", "The Leading Lady", "The Lion Party" (1926) and "Zodiacs" (1927), form one of the richest strands in Bailey's writings. But they are little known today, unfortunately. Anthologists have tended to prefer serious stories, and these playful ones are not much reprinted. All of these works show formal ingenuity, however, and show plot imagination that is not always present in Bailey's grim thriller tales.

Novels

The short stories starring Mr. Fortune are not Bailey's only detective works. He also wrote a series of novels about crooked lawyer Joshua Clunk, who does detective work on the side. The Red Castle (1932) (known in the US as The Red Castle Mystery) is well written but badly plotted. Although published at the height of the Golden Age, the book does not all adhere to Golden Age standards of mystery construction. It is not "fair play": one does not see how any reader could deduce the solution to the case from the evidence in the story. Nor is the crime brought home to one person, but rather to a diffuse conspiracy. Some of the crooks involved do not even make an appearance till the finale of the story! The behavior and motivations of the tutor in the story are completely inconsistent, and the whole burglary subplot in the book makes little logical sense. Anyone expecting a clever, Agatha Christie style solution at the end of this book is going to be horribly disappointed.

All of this said, much of the book is enjoyable reading. This is partly due to the well characterized detectives in the book, Joshua Clunk, and his likable young assistant Victor Hopley. Hopley is distinctly of working class origins, and his go getting spirit, and romance with a pretty, smart and observant young maid at the castle have plenty of appeal. They seem designed as a rebuke to much of the snobbery of 1930's Britain, and of the British detective story of the era. For that matter, Clunk himself is distinctly non-U. He must have considerable education to be a solicitor, but he never seems to display any upper class traits. His status as a lawyer for criminals trying to beat the system in part seems to be a sort of class conflict with the forces of social authority, played by the police. Clunk's enthusiasm for revivalist preaching, and his endowment of what seems to be a slum chapel, also mark him as an adherent to the religious practices of the poorest classes of Englishmen. Clunk's friends and clients all seem to be of the very small businessman and shopkeeper variety: tradesmen. In The Red Castle he makes friends with a lady running a tiny country inn, Miss Telfer, whose country cooking is one of the more entertaining features of the book.

The Red Castle also shows plenty of North Country local color. The descriptions of the moors are well written; so are the evocations of Roman ruins, and of the remains of the Roman cult of Mithras worship, which permeates the novel. Bailey also shows a Chesterton-like gift for descriptions of the weather, especially in how it affects light and visibility. Unlike many thriller writers, Bailey is much more oriented to daytime scenes than night ones. The sheer visibility afforded by daytime allows Bailey to extend the visual imagery that is so important to him. Also, Bailey likes an atmosphere of the everyday for his most chilling scenes, and this happens more often in the day than in the dark. At night, his characters simply go to bed, reserving the next day for more adventures.

Bailey often creates clues to his characters' personalities. One method is through interior decoration, describing in great detail his characters' rooms and places of business. These rooms tend to be cluttered, elaborately furnished, and redolent of their owners' personality. Characters' gardens are similarly described and symbolic. Another path into his characters' minds is through their hobbies. Binks' collecting and Sally's rock climbing in The Red Castle are examples, as are Joshua Clunk's eating and revivalist preaching. Characters are also sometimes color coded. For example, the little old lady's love of light blue and pink in "The Gipsy Moth", and Sally's green clothes in The Red Castle. The ostinato recurrence of pink and blue in "Moth" creates an effect of underlining the old lady's existence as a human being. We are reminded again and again that she was a person with wants and feelings.

Black Land, White Land (1937) is a Mr. Fortune novel with strange flaws. The solution fails to explain much of the previous mystery novel. The most interesting subplot - that dealing with police corruption - barely gets any explanation in the solution at all! And the choice of killer does little to explain the suspicious activities and emotional churnings among the more obvious suspects - one of whom should definitely have been picked as the murderer, instead. The book virtually feels like a mystery novel without a solution. The text also refers throughout to the fact of Mr. Fortune having made deductions and discoveries at many points, which one expects to be shared with the reader at the eventual denouement. This does not happen, either. This is all too bad, because the book is well written and absorbing as a piece of storytelling. Some of the landscape descriptions are very good, particularly when Bailey gets into the limestone and chalk regions, which fascinated R. Austin Freeman before him: see Freeman's "The Green Check Jacket". It is above average in terms of literary style. Still, most readers will prefer to enjoy Bailey's rich prose style in his best short stories, where the style is wedded to logical and complete mystery plots. By the way, the title Black Land, White Land refers to two types of soil in rural England. It has nothing to do with race or ethnic conflicts.

The Mr. Fortune novel, Black Land, White Land, fails to follow through in its solution, on its many intimations of police corruption. The same cannot be said of the Joshua Clunk novel, The Wrong Man (1945), which is made of much sterner stuff in this regard. The solution of this book is full of corrupt police activity, in a way that should also be present in the earlier book. But The Wrong Man has problems of its own, that sink it as a novel. Its highly complex plot is so tangled that it never quite turns into an organized, fair play puzzle. And the book is homophobic, something not at all present in Bailey's 1920's work. On a more positive note, Bailey's hero is an American officer who is stationed in Britain. Like Cyril Hare, Bailey clearly admired the Americans who had come to Britain to fight World War II.

The Bishop's Crime (1940) is a Mr. Fortune novel. It has a cathedral town, clerical setting, that recalls the short tale "The Woman in Wood" (1928). The opening chapters are written in Bailey's lively style, and have some interesting detective work, reconstructing a crime. But after this, the book slides into needless and confusing plot complications, and becomes uninteresting.

Margery Allingham

Allingham and Bailey

Margery Allingham's work shows some affinities to the Bailey school. Allingham sometimes wrote stories about children in trouble: "The Crimson Letters" (a.k.a. "The Longer View") (1938) seems a direct imitation of Bailey, in which a small clue leads to a plot against a child, a conspiracy of chilling, creepy evil in the full Bailey mode. The finale of Death of A Ghost (1934) seems right out of the Bailey approach. Mr. Campion is menaced by a sinister plot, that is directly based on little known scientific/medical facts. The plot is quite chilling, and has affinities with horror fiction. This recalls the lurid medical finales of such writers as Bailey and Wynne, such as "The Cyprian Bees". Ghost's thriller ending is the best part of that novel. Police at the Funeral (1931) also has some medical based murder schemes, treated as thriller/suspense menaces.

Allingham also shared some formal traits with Bailey. There is a tendency for small trivial clues to lead to wider scopes of problems. Allingham's short fiction is structurally like Bailey's, in that small incidents lead to the discovery of criminal conspiracies. However, the tone is usually much more light hearted. Allingham's small incidents tend to be personal problems or small mysteries experienced by young lovers. These small mysteries gradually lead to Campion discovering real crimes. These crimes are usually criminal enterprises of Rogues, such as jewel theft or smuggling, not the monstrous conspiracies in Bailey.

Her detective Mr. Campion is a genius with unofficial ties to Scotland Yard. While Mr. Campion is not a medical doctor like Mr. Fortune, he does have Fortune's upper class social standing. Both Fortune and Campion are often the protectors of young lovers. Frauds and swindles are common in upper class society in both writers. This may just be a convenient plot generator, but it is a persistent motif in Allingham, far more than in Christie or Marsh. There is a lot of fraud in Bailey. Nice young people often suffer unjust persecution in both authors, often being framed for something they didn't do. Campion's chauffeur, Lug, sometimes splits detective duties with Campion, just like Mr. Fortune's chauffeur Sam, with Lug or Sam researching the lower classes in a town while the detective sleuths among the upper. (Sayers' Bunter does this too.) In both the Bailey and Allingham stories, there is a great deal of emphasis on exploring upper class life, especially its cultural side. Allingham was more systematic about this than Bailey, but there are distinct similarities - see Bailey's "The Violet Farm" or "The Greek Play", for example. Both Bailey and Allingham showed a certain degree of disdain for the formal puzzle plot story popular in the Golden Age; once again, Allingham pushed this tendency to extremes, but the seeds are present in Bailey. Campion's investigations seem painfully unsystematic; they instead involve exploring more or less at random all aspects of a case.

Allingham and William Le Queux

Allingham's fiction also bears a family resemblance to the pre World War I spy stories of William Le Queux. Le Queux's characters gallivant all over Europe having adventures; so do Allingham's in novels like Sweet Danger (1933). Le Queux' characters are always looking for ingenious ways to communicate secret information - after all they are spies - and so are Allingham's. Such novel communication methods play major roles in many of the short stories in Mr. Campion and Others. Spies in Le Queux are always stealing valuable secret documents at upper class house parties; so are people in Allingham. Le Queux' spy hero in "The Brass Butterfly" finds a way to protect and bring the young lovers together, while solving a detective problem that controls their fate; this is the role played by Mr. Campion in most of his short stories. The young heroine in "The Brass Butterfly" is a brilliantly colorful figure of energy, resourcefulness and charm; her boyfriend, while likable, is little more than a stalwart upper class cipher: this is the same sort of characterization typical in Allingham.

Allingham's Logical Satires on Detective Fiction

By contrast, Allingham is well known for some short tales that ingeniously burlesque detective story conventions, such as "The Border-Line Case" (a 1930's tale), "The Snapdragon and the C.I.D." (1961), and "The Villa Marie Celeste" (1960). These have no parallel in the Bailey school, as far as I know, but do run parallel to such Sayers spoofs as "The Milk Bottles" and "Scrawns". Allingham's works are not Mad Magazine or Carol Burnett style parodies; rather they are apparently solemn mystery tales whose unexpected solutions puncture holes in some detective tale conventions. Later, Borges' "Death and The Compass" (1944) and Carr's The Curse of the Bronze Lamp (1945), will have something of the same effect: logical satires on the formal detective tale. Allingham apparently got into the satire business first, according to the dates of these tales, although G.K.Chesterton's "The White Pillar Murders" (1925) and Arnold Bennett's "Murder!" (1926) are even earlier "logical takeoffs" on the genre. Loel Yeo's "Inquest" (1932), the sole detective story of an apparently pseudonymous writer, also is an assault on a detective story convention, this time The Will. (Allingham included a character called Superintendent Yeo in her "Tall Story".) Allingham's satires, like those of the other authors mentioned here, are targeted at the formal detective story, whereas Sayers' tales are takeoffs on the conventions of thriller fiction. Most of the mystery writers mentioned were noted for their logic; it is not surprising that they would discover some logical "holes" in detective story technique. "The Snapdragon and the C.I.D." intercuts Allingham's satire with a moving nostalgia and evocation of the passage of time. Paradoxically, Allingham's satires on the formal detective tale are among her most ingeniously plotted puzzle stories. When she wrote straightforward detective fiction, (which was most of the time - these satires are only a small fraction of her work) she was usually far less interested in the puzzle plot format.

"The Border-Line Case" has a clever puzzle plot. It bears some similarity to a non-satire story, "On Christmas Day in the Morning" (1952). Both deal with mysterious crimes, in which the geography of the crime scene is all important. Both tales have different solutions - Allingham is coming up with different solutions to the same kind of mystery problem.

Allingham's Short Stories: Mr. Campion and Others

Mr. Campion and Others is Allingham's most important collection. It exists in two versions, a hardback from 1939, which mixes Campion and non-Campion tales, and a later, all Campion paperback. I much prefer the all Campion version. All of these Campion stories were published in The Strand magazine in 1936 - 1940. Even the more minor tales in the collection, such as "The Widow" (1937), "The Danger Point" (1937), "The Frenchman's Gloves" (1938) and "The White Elephant" (1936), have their charms, and the collection should probably be read as a whole. Although unfortunately not included in Mr. Campion and Others, such fine Campion Christmas stories as "The Case is Altered" (1938) and "The Man with the Sack" (1936) also belong to this series of Strand tales. They are included in other Allingham collections. The order in which the tales were originally published: "The White Elephant" (1936), "The Case of the Old Man in the Window" (1936), "The Man with the Sack" (1936), "The Widow" (1937), "The Danger Point" (1937), "The Definite Article" (1937), "The Question Mark" (1938), "The Name on the Wrapper" (1938), "The Frenchman's Gloves" (1938), "The Longer View" (1938), "The Hat Trick" (1938), "The Case is Altered" (1938), "The Meaning of the Act" (1939), "Safe As Houses" (1940) and "A Matter of Form" (1940). This last story appeared in the May 1940 issue of the Strand; one sees that it was probably written not too long after war broke out in September 1939. The series, and the happy, comic English life it describes, did not long survive the horrors of World War II.

Among Allingham's puzzle plot stories, "The Hat Trick" (1938) and "The Case of the Old Man in the Window" (1936) shows a similar plot complexity to her "logical" tales, and are especially appealing. In both tales, apparently magical situations occur, to which Campion eventually finds logical explanations. These are not quite impossible crimes in the Chesterton-Carr tradition; instead the events seem magical, an eruption of magic or the supernatural into daily life. Such "magic explained" is also an element in "The Villa Marie Celeste" (1960) and "Safe As Houses" (1940). Also outstanding as a pure mystery is "The Meaning of the Act" (1939). This tale, like many of Allingham's 1930's and 40's tales, incorporates elements of the Rogue tradition. Crooks in these stories tend to have a clever, ingenious scheme; unraveling this scheme forms an important element of the puzzle plot.

Allingham's Campion short stories show real story telling polish. Like Ellery Queen's short stories of the period, they are fully worked up pieces including plot, detection, characters, social atmosphere. One feels that both Queen and Allingham had standards, and they did not release a piece till it reached the full measure of what a short story should be. Allingham's tales have a recurring set of comic characters. There are the strong willed old women, usually social aristocrats. These ladies are never crooks, but they are often innocently embroiled in some criminal scheme. Their enormously forceful personalities sweep all before them. Then there are the young women. While naive, they are remarkably charming, determined and manipulative. These innocent young women often get in trouble with crooks, and need to be bailed out by Campion. However, these young charmers are already formidable personalities, and one can easily imagine them growing up to be the forceful old ladies of the stories. There is a distinct feminist vision to these tales, with the women in the stories showing the most resiliency and bounce. By contrast, their young boyfriends, while cast in the role of noble young heroes and lovers, tend to have little real merits other than youth and social position - and despite the "society" background of these stories, one wonders if there is any real merit in social position. The men in the stories with the most ability are distinctly from the lower classes. These include the charming rogue characters, who serve as anti-heroes in the stories. They also include some more honest lower class characters as well, such as the gifted amateur detective in "The Question Mark" (1938), and the pickpocket in "The Meaning of the Act" (1939).

Allingham's Themes

A persistent motif in Allingham's work is resurrection. She is particularly interested in characters who come back from the dead. Or who do schemes, like the artist in Death of a Ghost, which give them a certain "immortality" after death. Another common Allingham motif is The Danger of Going Out To Eat and Drink. Scenes in restaurants always lead to some sort of major disaster or threat to her characters, often the start of a major suspense sequence. Other common Allingham attitudes: revisiting old school days or the memories of youth leads to horror. Old people are a dead hand on the young, dominating, corrupt and given to blackmail and extortion. Servants are far more shrewd, observant and intelligent than they are sometimes portrayed by other Golden Age writers. People often have doubles.

Like other Golden Age authors, Allingham was interested in architecture. She especially liked urban courtyards. See "The Border-Line Case", "The Lieabout" (a 1930's tale), "Tall Story" (1954), the opening of Police at the Funeral (1931). Allingham also loved hotels, and other places one stays while on the road. Her adventure novel Sweet Danger (1933) opens with depictions of first a luxury hotel in France, then an English pub-inn, then finally a private home in the country that takes in paying guests. Both hotels and English country homes where people are weekend guests frequently occur in Allingham's fiction. Another recurrent image in Allingham: The country home that has been completely torn down: see Sweet Danger, "Safe As Houses" (1940). Chapter 10 of Sweet Danger describes the overdone lobbies of a pretentious business, with considerable comic charm. Allingham clearly shared the snobbish distaste of upper-class Englishmen of her day for "trade". As a more business oriented American, these passages always seem to me to be wrong headed.

Although it stars Campion, Sweet Danger is an adventure novel, not a mystery: there is not a central mysterious situation that needs to be explained. The early chapters of the book show much inventive detail, but then it runs out of pep. Many of Allingham's mystery short stories benefit from a touch of adventure material, as well.

Traitor's Purse (1940 - 1941) falls into three sections, each with its own style. The opening chapters (Chapters 1 - 6) remind one of the Strand short stories Allingham had just been writing, later collected as Mr. Campion and Others. These stories deal subtly with character relationships among the sophisticated set in Britain, and feature much clever mystery plotting. Here the amnesia motif is very well handled. The middle section of the book (Chapters 7 - 10) is very much in the same style as Allingham's earlier thriller Sweet Danger (1933). Both works are thrillers, and seem a long way from the paradigms of the Golden Age country house mystery. Both stories have an extravagant wealth of bizarre, eccentric invention. Both guest star Campion's love interest, Lady Amanda Fitton. Both take place in very peculiar English towns, steeped in ancient traditions and a powerful sense of menacing activities going on behind the scenes. Both invoke an invented European institution going back to the Renaissance or beyond, Averna in Sweet Danger, the Bridge Institute in Traitor's Purse. Both books are full of large scale, unusual architecture, associated with centers of sinister power. This is partly in the Golden Age tradition of interesting buildings, although Allingham imaginatively takes this right over the top.

Traitor's Purse falls apart in its final section, when Campion goes On The Run from the authorities. His fugitive status starts mid way through Chapter 10, and lasts for most of the rest of the novel. The inventiveness disappears.

The Family Stories

Police at the Funeral (1931) and "One Morning They'll Hang Him" (1950) are both in the same genre of Allingham stories. Both deal with a large house, filled with an extended family, and dominated by an elderly woman. Both houses are full of elaborately described furniture, mainly wooden, antique and valuable. There is a quality of concreteness to everything Allingham has visualized, at once lively and unpretentious. The house itself tends to become a character in these stories. The mail and letters play a role in both works. Both works are genuine, puzzle plot detective stories, of a kind Allingham did not always write. "One Morning They'll Hang Him" is a pretty good detective story, while Police at the Funeral is marred by its ugly racial stereotypes. Another short story in the same mode is "Safe As Houses" (1940). Here the eccentric family is presented as Campion's own. The old lady in the tale is just as concerned with her furniture, being horrified by a ring on a table again. And once again, letter writing plays a role in the tale. Campion's comically whiny Cousin Monmouth in the story is similar to Uncle William in Police, Uncle William being one of Allingham's richest creations.

Allingham's characters always tend to be members of families. They rarely stand on their own, or are unattached people with romantic relationships, but no blood ties. Sometimes they are young men from "the best families", like Campion himself, and many of Allingham's romantic leads. Other times, they are members of middle class families. One thinks of the unhappy family in Police at the Funeral, and the Fittons in Sweet Danger. While the Fittons are as happy and nice as the family in Police are warped, both families actually resemble each other a lot. Both families are eccentric. Both have money trouble. Both seem to stick very close to the large home where they all live together, and seem to have little interests beyond this house. None seem to have jobs that take them outside the home. Both families contain a large number of siblings, and an older woman who serves as matriarch. Both families have an ancient home, both have a lot of old furniture, both are keeping up traditions of the past that have nearly died out elsewhere. In both cases, being a member of this family marks one as a special person, sharing in traditions and attitudes that completely cut one off from the outside world. Both families virtually have a "culture" in the anthropological sense, a set of values, beliefs and life styles separate from the rest of society.

Allingham's work is uneven. The novella "The Case of the Late Pig" (1937) has an excellent first chapter, with an intriguing situation. It is also interesting in that it is narrated by Campion himself. However, the novella degenerates into extreme blandness after this. I didn't like Allingham's most prestigious book, The Fashion in Shrouds (1938). Its fashion designer characters are so arch and affected, and depicted with such unfriendly malice, that the work has a smothering quality.

Anthony Wynne

The Room with the Iron Shutters (1930) is a minor impossible crime novel. Its locked room idea derives directly from Israel Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery (1891), so it is hardly a landmark in the genre. More creative are some of the medical mystery ideas. Wynne seems to have invented new medical conditions, as well as new drugs to treat them, and woven this into his plot and solution. This concern with new, imaginary medical drugs with strange properties also pops up in other Bailey school writers, such as J.J. Connington. I am of two minds about all this. On the one hand, Wynne's plot has a certain satisfying symmetry and ingenuity, in dealing with these imaginary chemicals and their effects. On the other, it seems like a complete violation of fair play. There is no way that any reader could have predicted such new substances or their effect. So the solution of the mystery seems to be arbitrarily made up. A mystery writer could "explain" just about anything by making up some imaginary medical syndrome out of whole cloth. A tale like this in fact approaches science fiction. A better writer might have carefully explained the syndrome during the exposition, thus playing fairer with the reader. Readers can experience most of Wynne's plot by reading the opening, Chapters 1-5, and the solution, Chapters 25-29.

Philip MacDonald

Philip MacDonald's books, like those of Margery Allingham, have some similarities to the Bailey school. Thriller elements keep breaking in and taking over from the puzzle plot in all of these writers. There is certainly NOT an atmosphere of calm reasoning or ratiocination in any of these writers. There is an attempt to make villains really frightening, either by making them mentally deranged killers, or by making them heads of sinister conspiracies. There is a good deal of abnormal psychology, which seems to be made up out whole cloth by all these writers listed, based on their literary intuitions of how the abnormal mind allegedly works. Anthony Gethryn, like Mr. Fortune, seems to be something of an independent operator, with resources not fully available to the police (Albert Campion will be even more independent). There is definitely NOT an atmosphere of "the police are in charge here while the crime is being investigated", as there is in both the Crofts and Van Dine schools: among other things, this would subvert the thriller element. Instead, there is a suspenseful feel of independent operatives up single handed against monstrous evils. Small clues, in both MacDonald's Warrant for X, and in the typical Bailey work, often lead to big crimes being unearthed. Agatha Christie noticed and burlesqued this "tiny clue leads to major conspiracy" approach, in her Bailey pastiche in Partners In Crime (1924). There is also an air of rampant heterosexuality to most of the members of the Bailey school, with both the detectives and the suspects all having lives that center around marriage and other long term male-female couplings.

Some of MacDonald's books have been made into entertaining movies. Edgar Selwyn directed The Mystery of Mr. X (1934), based on the MacDonald novel known as X. v. Rex (1933) in Britain, and as The Mystery of the Dead Police in the US. Henry Hathaway directed 23 Paces to Baker Street (1956) based on MacDonald's Warrant For X (1938). Both of these films are discussed in the articles on their directors.

Anthony Gethryn is MacDonald's best known series sleuth, making his debut in The Rasp (1924), a well reviewed book I have never been able to enjoy. Warrant For X (1938) with Gethryn also seems overrated, although it has some good detection in early chapters involving a shopping list. The main feature of this novel is its depiction of its villain, a sinister mastermind who never appears on stage in the story. Unfortunately, villains have never had the slightest interest to me; I only like detectives. The non-series book The Polferry Riddle (1931), also known as The Choice, did not appeal to me either.

MacDonald's Rynox (1930), also known as The Rynox Murder Mystery, is a novel without a MacDonald series detective. Indeed, it is a novel without any detective at all. There is a brief initial investigation by the police, but mainly the crime is solved when the culprit confesses at the end. Instead, much of the book is taken up with vaguely comic vignettes, telling the story of the events leading up to the crime and its aftermath. These often make entertaining reading. They are full of cameo portraits of working class members of Britain, a group of people usually featured less often in Golden Age fiction. Even the more middle class characters are businessmen here, being members of the Rynox company, and are not the upper class people of leisure one often finds in this era. Bailey and Allingham also sometimes featured sympathetic working class characters in their tales. While considered as a puzzle plot, the book is very slowly paced - Agatha Christie would have packed all this into a short story - the puzzle is well constructed, and managed to surprise me at the end. The solution has elements which recall the work of R. Austin Freeman, although it has no medical or scientific aspects. The sheer methodicalness of the culprit, and his willingness to put an elaborate, logically thought through and very detailed scheme into place over many months, seems Freeman like, as do many details of that scheme. The book is divided into Reels, like a movie, and the first two Reels are much better than the third - the reader can skip from the end of Reel Two right into the Prologue which ends the tale without losing any plot.

MacDonald's Murder Gone Mad (1931) is a pioneer novel dealing with an unknown serial killer. It is preceded by John Rhode's The Murders in Praed Street (1928). Belloc Lowndes' The Lodger was much earlier, but that looks at a known suspect in a series of Jack the Ripper type slayings; so does Francis Beeding's Death Walks in Eastrepps (1931). MacDonald's book is strongly influenced by H. C. Bailey. The crimes are crimes against young people, as in Bailey. And the killer's motive, a perverted desire to see people suffer, is also straight out of Bailey's works: see "The Unknown Murder" (1923), for example. Rhode's and MacDonald's novels are the archetypes of an immense series of other works dealing with serial killers, such as Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails (1949).

Murder Gone Mad is not a favorite of mine. The early scenes are well written, but the book tapers off in diffuseness and mediocrity as it progresses. (This is a good description of MacDonald's Warrant For X (1938), as well.) The puzzle plot aspects of the work are nil. The killer is eventually caught through some good police work, but any "fair play" clues to the killer's identity are non-existent. Much of the material, as in much of the Bailey school, is "sick".

John Dickson Carr once picked MacDonald's book as one of the ten best mystery novels of all time. The scenes late in the book where the police stake out the village, setting traps for the killer, pop up in the final scenes of several of Carr's works. Carr admired this book (in 1946), not so much for its mystery plot elements, but as the ultimate in horror. Today, serial killer books are so common that they are recognized as a subgenre of crime fiction. Most people today would regard MacDonald's books as pretty weak tea. They have been superseded by a host of much sicker works.

J.J. Connington

J.J. Connington's The Case With Nine Solutions (1928) has some features that remind one of H.C. Bailey. It deals not with a straightforward single crime, but a complex coincidence laden tangle perpetrated by two villains, operating independently of each other. At the center is a horrendous science based scheme victimizing a woman. Another woman, a maid, is brutally murdered. A third science based plot occurs at the finale, putting the detective in jeopardy. The book also falls in the same place along the realist-intuitionist axis as Bailey. There are a good deal of science based criminal schemes, but little use of science based detection. There are none of the structural interests of the realist school, such as alibis, backgrounds, or the "breakdown of identity". Instead all of the detection and most of the puzzle plotting is straightforwardly in the intuitionist mode. All of this reminds one of Bailey. There is much less of a thriller element here than in H.C. Bailey, however, and Connington's prose is much plainer.

Connington is an exceptionally cold and heartless writer; no one in the book seems to have the slightest sign of human compassion or warmth. Also, his plot is a mess, and the detection routine, with the exception of the science based elements in the tale. The book is not recommended at all. Warning: The title suggests that this is a mystery in the tradition of E.C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case, Ellery Queen's The Greek Coffin Mystery, or Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case, dealing with multiple, successive solutions. This is not so. Instead, the 9 solutions are all routine permutations of each other, and are discussed as a group one third the way through the case, in Chapter 6.

A comic footnote to the book: in Chapter 15 Connington introduces a middle aged maid called Mrs. Marple. Today no one would dream of naming a character this, but in 1928 the first of the series of Miss Marple stories that would make up Agatha Christie's The Tuesday Night Club Murders were just appearing in magazines. (There is some evidence that the single non series story "Death by Drowning" appeared in 1926, which would make it the first Miss Marple tale of all.)

The best parts of The Case With Nine Solutions are the opening chapters (1 - 5). The beginning is virtually a quotation of R. Austin Freeman: it deals with a young doctor, serving as a substitute for another, who is called out to a mysterious house where he witnesses the aftermath of a crime. This is a common initial situation in Freeman's books. But nothing that comes thereafter is especially Freeman like, and the doctor himself drops out of the work after a while. The opening scenes of driving through a foggy night are quite effective. They have a vivid tactile quality missing in much of the later novel. They also have a historical aspect, showing today's reader what driving was like in the 1920's.

Dorothy L. Sayers pays tribute to Connington's The Two Tickets Puzzle (1930) in Chapters 27 and 29 of her The Five Red Herrings (1931). Giving him full credit, she builds on one of his ideas for part of her solution.

John Dickson Carr was a Connington enthusiast: see his essay "The Greatest Game in the World" (1946). Carr's first novel was published in 1930, and he mentions two of Connington's 1920's novels with admiration. They were evidently part of his literary background in the years of his formation as a writer. The scene at the end of Chapter 4 of The Case With Nine Solutions, in which the detective chillingly reconstructs the maid's murder, reminds one of similar reconstructions to come by Dr. Fell in Carr's books. The plotting technique of the early chapters in which the author gradually reveals and interconnects several different crime situations, also has some similarities to Carr's, and might have influenced him. Just as in Carr, we first see the puzzling and sinister aftermath of each crime, then gradually the detectives penetrate to the underlying events leading up to the situation. It reminds one of such Carr novels as Death-Watch (1935) or Death in Five Boxes (1938). The whole investigation takes place at night, in lonely and mysterious buildings, and has a macabre flavor. Various characters in the story are introduced in the middle of the ongoing investigation, and the detectives track their movements before and during the crime, during their interrogations. All of this could have served as a model for Carr's novelistic technique. Even the scene in Chapter 6, which discusses the various mathematical permutations of solutions possible in the crime, has some formal similarities to the Locked Room Lecture in Carr's The Three Coffins (1935), which systematically analyzes the permutations of kinds of impossible crimes.

Mark Brand

Connington wrote two books about his series sleuth Mark Brand, The Counselor (1939) and The Four Defences (1940). Mark Brand is clearly an attempt by Connington to create a much friendlier and hipper detective than his other series sleuth, Sir Clinton Driffield. Mark Brand is a radio columnist, a very glamorous profession in that era, as well as a high tech one, something Connington clearly liked. Brand is humorous and witty, full of energy, and a loud dresser. Brand's conversation is full of literary quotes, in the tradition of E.C. Bentley and Dorothy L. Sayers. Brand is known as The Counselor, the title of his radio persona, who gives advice to his listeners.

The Four Defenses (1940) shows Connington's interest in science, both in the murder plot itself, and in the means of detection. Mark Brand employs an analytic chemist to study such clues as soil samples and paint. Connington explains such scientific analysis in fascinating detail. These sections recall the work of R. Austin Freeman. However, Connington stresses the recent nature of many of these methods of scientific analysis, and we do seem to be seeing approaches more modern than the somewhat Edwardian ones used in Freeman's earlier novels. The interest in "the disposal of the body" also seems Freeman like. There is a crypt scene somewhat recalling that in Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke's Discovery (1932).

Connington also shows how radio broadcasters can appeal to the public for information. These portions of the novel, mainly in the early chapters, show considerable ingenuity. The gambit of having radio broadcasters look into unsolved crimes popped up in such entertaining Hollywood pictures as George Sherman's Mystery Broadcast (1943).

The Four Defences is notable for the complexity of the plot. Every chapter unveils much new detail about the crimes. There is no padding: Connington has produced a Golden Age detective novel whose length is justified by the richness of the plot.

Ruth Rendell

The contemporary British writer Ruth Rendell shows some signs of affinity with the Bailey - Allingham tradition. There is an interest in morbid psychology in her work. There is the alternation between suspense, and the traditional puzzle plot. There is the emphasis on married or other long term male-female couples, both among her detectives and her suspects. And there are medically based crimes - Rendell is especially interested in poisons and toxicology. A story like "Means of Evil" recalls Allingham's interest in such things in the finale of Death of a Ghost. Also, the vaguely countercultural menages examined in stories like "Means of Evil" recall Bailey's interest in such groups in such 1920's stories as "The Violet Farm". In both writers, there is a suggestion that people who engage in slightly unconventional lifestyles - in Rendell's case a bunch of 1970's health food faddists - are setting themselves up for an unwholesome situation, one that can lead to psychological aberration, and then to murder. One can see cross currents of psychological tension between members of the group in Rendell; a similar approach appeared in Bailey.